Sir Alex Ferguson is always banging on about wanting a winter break in football - to give the players a chance to rest their bodies and then come back refreshed and full of vigour. Let's see what it's done to Desperate Housewives (Channel 4), which has been off, mid-season, since before Christmas.

There's certainly plenty going on. Porter's in deep doo-dah, because Dave says he saw him leaving the scene of the restaurant fire. Susan and Mike, meanwhile, are thinking that maybe it's not over, after all. By "it", I mean them. And Bree discovers that her son's new boyfriend was in an adult movie once - and that's not "adult" as in complex and sophisticated, but "adult" as in gay porn. Rear Deployment, it's called, set in the military, in fatigues.

But it's Carlos I'm feeling most sorry for. Remember when he was told he'd never see again? Turns out that was a lie (Carlos gets loads of rubbish medical advice - I'm sure he and Gaby were also told they couldn't have kids, and here they are now with a couple of enormous ones). Anyway, you'd think that regaining your eyesight would be a happy event, and indeed it is. But there is a downside too - the realisation that your kids are fat, for one; and that you are, too. That your hot wife isn't as hot as she was when you last could see her. That she's also a liar (well, you knew that anyway). That you're now poor, and your lukewarm wife has had to sell everything in the house, including your prize baseball autographed by the famous baseball player (not Babe Ruth, another one). And that you're in a TV comedy-drama that isn't as good as it was when you could last see it.

To be fair - and it's important to be - this is a good episode, full of intrigue, questions that need answers, and new threads. The hiatus done good. But Desperate Housewives will never be what it was in the first two series.

Fresh and original can't stay fresh and original without evolving, and there hasn't been enough of that. It once felt like something different - it was kitsch, witty, self-mocking and looked fabulous. Now it's a bit irritating.

Especially the camp, pizzicato, plinky-plonky soundtrack. And even more especially the woman doing the cloying narration, Mary Alice Young.

"It's an awful thing to live in the dark, unable to see what others take for granted. But sometimes, for a lucky few, a flicker of light pierces that darkness, and brings with it the promise of better things to come."

Agghhh, you'd want to throttle her if she wasn't dead already.

Oh, and on the subject of death, how come there are no dates on Lila and Paige's graves? Any ideas? Maybe it's because they're not dead at all, just taking a break.

FM (ITV2) is a new sitcom, with the same kind of vibe as The IT Crowd - we're in the workplace, the stars are a woman and two blokes, one of whom is funny Irishman Chris O'Dowd. OK, so the "sit" is different. FM takes place at an indie radio station (it's FM as in frequency modulation). But the "com" is similar - puns and witticisms, isunderstandings, awkward situations. Old-school then, to be polite. Or lame, if you prefer.

The longest-running gag is that O'Dowd somehow gets himself a slot as a proper DJ in a club, even though he doesn't know how to do it - couldn't even mix a metaphor. So he cheats, gets a CD of mixes off a kid (a black character who wears a baseball cap back to front and says "bro" a lot, slightly embarrassingly), and just pretends to be playing vinyl and scratching and doing all that. Guess what, the CD gets stuck (as it was always going to), and he's made to look like an idiot. Do you get it?

There is the odd glimmer of hope. I woke up at one uncharacteristically shocking - and uncharacteristically funny - line. It's too rude to repeat here, but if you saw it you'll know the one I mean (yup, the one about mother-loving). And it has walk-on (kinda) celebrities - in this one, Justin Hawkins from the Darkness, the Guillemots, and Marianne Faithfull in the distance. Celebrities can be funny. We, the jury, will stay out for one more episode, then. But I'm not over-hopeful. It's a brave thing to set a sitcom in a radio station. The last one I can think of is Frasier. No pressure, then.